History's People: Birchrunville once home to Nobel Laureate surgeon

Thursday, June 20, 2013

When Margaret and Thomas C. Willcox purchased their Birchrunville, West Vincent, home about 20 years ago, they were drawn by the quaint setting and historic character. Thomas, a builder, and Margaret, now a real estate agent, had no idea that their house was once home to a man who changed the medical trajectory of the world.

Then one day, Margaret looked out her window and saw a curious sight -- a couple, in their 70s or 80s, pulled over on the side of the road, pointing at her house. Wondering what they were doing, she introduced herself and met Dr. Joseph E. Murray and his wife Virginia (“Bobby”). Learning that they once called her home their home, she invited them in and learned an incredible story that started right there in Birchrunville.

Dr. Joseph Murray was born in 1919 in Milford, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard Medical School from 1940 to 1943 and met his wife Virginia “Bobby” Link while enjoying a Boston Symphony Orchestra recital. Bobby was an aspiring pianist and vocalist, a dream she accomplished later. He joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 1944 at the height of World War II. Murray was 21 years old when he married Bobby in 1945.

Immediately after their wedding in Binghamton, NY, they headed to Atlantic City for a three-day honeymoon. They never turned back, going straight to their new home in Birchrunville, a spot Dr. Murray’s parents had scouted out for them. Less than one week after their wedding day, he carried her over the threshold.

“It was idyllic -- we were so lucky,” Bobby recalls today. They had around 40 acres of land surrounded by woods with no one in sight. There was a bubbling brook with a serene swimming hole. They rented the property as “the owner was in the South Pacific fighting the war.”

In this idyllic life, Bobby vividly remembers some intriguing occurrences: a bizarre car crash in their front yard that resulted in severe injuries to a family, taking her half-Jewish friend who had escaped the Holocaust to meet the German prisoners of war at Valley Forge General Hospital, and dropping off Dr. Murray at the local crossroads for carpooling due to the gas shortage.

Why move to Chester County? Dr. Murray was assigned to Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville through a stroke of luck. He was in Fort Dix, New Jersey, awaiting his assignment. As Bobby recounts, when he lined up with seven other enlistees, the sergeant-in-charge assigned the first three men to posts overseas. Then the phone rang with a specific request for one of the medical enlistees to serve at Valley Forge. Joseph Murray volunteered, was assigned there, and the next three men in line were all sent overseas like the first three.

Dr. Murray started as a lieutenant at the hospital but quickly rose to captain and then major. Valley Forge General Hospital was the largest military hospital in the United States and served as the national center for plastic surgery. The extent and quantity of burn injuries from the war was a catalyst for advances in plastic surgery.

At Valley Forge, Dr. Murray became fascinated with the process of skin grafting, which later led to his expertise in organ transplantation. As noted in his Nobel Prize autobiographical account, “while there, I spent all my available spare time on the plastic surgical wards which were jammed with hundreds of battle casualties.”

Dr. Murray became intrigued with the problem of host patients’ bodies rejecting skin grafts. He drew on the work of Colonel James Barrett Brown, chief of plastic surgery at the hospital, who determined that the rejection of skin grafts was due to genetic differences between recipients and donors. This discovery, according to Dr. Murray, “was the impetus to my study of organ transplantation.”

Colonel Brown arranged, without Dr. Murray knowing, for him to stay at the hospital longer than the nine-month tour he was originally assigned. Murray was part of an incredible team, as he described in his memoir “Surgery of the Soul,” “the right combination of talent, spirit, and courage coalesced at Valley Forge.” Altogether, he spent three years at the hospital.

Murray ended up running the plastic surgical service at the hospital. Even after the end of the war many soldiers needed extensive medical care. Bobby got involved too, helping with patient care in the hospital.

They later moved from Birchrunville to Kimberton, a bit closer to the hospital. Despite enjoying their life in Chester County, Dr. Murray yearned to return to Massachusetts.

Following his service at Valley Forge, the couple moved to Massachusetts where Dr. Murray completed his surgical residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Children’s Hospital, where he had started his residency in 1944 before moving to Pennsylvania. In 1951, he joined the staff at the hospital as plastic and general surgeon. There, Dr. Murray’s fascination with the idea of transplantation persisted from his work at Valley Forge, and he and a team of surgeons investigated the possibility of transplanting organs.

In 1954, a patient named Richard Herrick, who was dying from kidney disease, presented the team with a possibility. His healthy identical twin was willing to donate a kidney to save his life. The concept of subjecting a healthy person -- Herrick’s twin -- to risk for the sake of saving another life was new. For doctors trained to always “do no harm,” this procedure required, as Murray’s memoir explains, “a basic shift in our thinking.” After multiple genetic tests, fingerprinting, and practice on a cadaver, the team led by Murray performed the first successful organ transplant on Dec. 23, 1954.

Dr. Murray went on to pioneer other types of transplantation, including kidney transplants between unrelated individuals and the first transplantation of a cadaver kidney in 1962. From 1952 to 1975 he was director of Surgical Research Laboratory at Harvard Medical School.

He is credited with the training of numerous transplantation doctors, which greatly expanded his influence to include other organ transplant innovations. In 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his accomplishments.

Dr. Joseph Murray died in November 2012, but he left a global legacy of countless lives saved and transformed. He was a “wonderful father and husband” Bobby says today. One could say that it all started in Chester County, at Birchrunville, with newlyweds crossing a threshold and a young aspiring enlisted surgeon following his inquisitiveness in the quest to help humanity.

Chester County Historical Society volunteer Robert O. Young assisted in researching this article.